My Very Worst Roommates were two girls who my friend (and also roommate) referred to as Regina and Karen. Yes, the conniving, blonde, queen bee type (Regina) and the stupid blonde (Karen) from the film Mean Girls. We were all American exchange students living in a university affiliated, five-person, student flat. Our fifth roommate, J, although she wasn’t a menace as were Regina and Karen, her loyalty obviously laid with them. Things started out fine. It was orientation week, and our roommates were coming back every single night completely plastered. However, it being orientation week in an alcohol-loving country where the drinking age is 18, most students who lived in the university-affliated apartment complex were wasted. My friend and I attributed it to the hype of orientation week. The semester then began, and Regina and Karen’s drinking and partying habits continued. They would go out six nights a week and come back at 2AM with a bunch of strangers and drunkenly cooking because they wouldn’t eat much before they went out (so they could get drunk faster and consume fewer calories– so smart).

My friend and I started getting paranoid and were locking our bedroom doors every night for fear a drunken stranger would try to open it while we were sleeping. Our front door was also constantly propped open because a few roommates lost their keys, and also, who wants to carry a key card around? I mean, it’s so annoying. Also, after having friends over, drinking and whatnot, Regina and Karen would never clean up after themselves. Our floor was covered in goon, the slang term for cheap, disgusting boxed wine. Now, it wasn’t just these minor things that made Regina and Karen my very worst roommates, there were a number of incidences that left my friend and I flabbergasted. During the first incident, our roommates had people over to smoke pot. Now, this wouldn’t normally be a big deal, but when you’re in a foreign country on a visa, if anyone in your living area is caught with drugs everyone in that apartment is at risk of being deported. We all spent a lot of money to get where we were, and we weren’t about to lose that by the stupidity of people we didn’t even like. My friend talked to Karen and asked that no more drugs be brought into our apartment. A week later there was a kid sorting pot on our coffee table.

One night, my wonderful roommates came back from a local tavern with some friends studying in another city. A friend of a friend of Regina was preposterously drunk and fell on the floor. I was laying in bed, annoyed by their drunken chatter and yells when I heard a bang and “Are you okay? Did you hit your head?” I ignored it for a bit, until I heard more drunken questions about this injury. Being one of two sober people in the apartment, I got out of bed and went to check to make sure everything was alright. As I went into the common room, the kid passed out again and hit his head again. He lost consciousness, but regained it within a few second, however he was very confused. When I looked around to tell someone to call security, I recognized no one in my apartment. Finally, Regina came in and I looked at her and told her to call security while my friend called the ambulance. When the ambulance arrived, he refused medical attention. Security told him they were going to call him a cab to take him back to his hostel, and then left. I went back to my room assuming this nightmare was over. Wrong. I heard my roommates say to him “Do you want to go back to your hostel or do you want to stay here?” Of course, he opted to stay in our apartment. All I could think of was what a liability it would be if he had some kind of head injury and was dead on the couch in the morning.

The morning after the incident, my friend and I went to the office to ask for bleach, as our lovely roommates had so kindly left our apartment for a weekend away, leaving goon and blood stains on our floor. The office didn’t have bleach, but the receptionist told us to contact management about the incident. I did immediately afterwards, asking for action to be taken against my roommates. I also contacted my study abroad program manager to tell her about the incident, as I had kept her updated on our problems with our roommates. My program manager worked her magic and got our bad roommates moved out after a significant amount of drama. We then had two quiet, kind and respectful girls move in in their place. Taking it to management was the best and most stressful decision I could have made.

During my sophomore and junior years of college, I had the extreme misfortune of living with my three Very Worst Roommates.

R was a spoiled brat. She would always call her mom and yell at her to give her more money, and said many times, “If I can throw money at a problem to make it go away, I’ll totally do it.” If I was going to the store half a block away, she would whine for me to get candy for her. When I couldn’t find it, she’d blame me instead of getting it herself. She required total silence from 9 p.m. onwards, but would be blasting her music at 7 a.m. She was a slob, too, never doing any dishes, and letting piles of them get moldy under her bed. She was extremely fat, and her doctor told her to watch her calorie intake. R took this to mean that every morning for breakfast, she could have a bagel slathered with cream cheese, bacon, more cheese and several eggs. Not exactly Jenny Craig.

C was a self-righteous prima donna. She was constantly dating, and cheating on, new guys and using them for their cars. She was super messy most of the time, except when she went on cleaning kicks for the entire apartment (though not nearly often enough). I’m pretty neat and usually helped out when she did this, except she would scream at all of us for not helping her. She slept with my boyfriend between sophomore and junior years, and apparently all three of MVWRs knew for months and didn’t tell me. C was self-absorbed, and convinced she was the next Janis Joplin, spending hours practicing with her lame reggae band of white kids.

L was the best of the three because she was constantly with her boyfriend and out of the house. But when she was back, her and C were inseparable- gossiping about me and my friends behind my back, and generally being catty and spiteful. Halfway through my junior year, all three of MVWR sat me down and explained to me that they didn’t like me as a person (me!) and asked me to move out when the lease was up. I spent a couple weeks miserable in my room, alone and abusing painkillers, before realizing it was a blessing in disguise. I now live with two wonderful girls, and am dating a much better guy. I just hope I never have to live with anyone like the last MVWR crew again.

I needed a roommate so I looked on Craigslist. I found J, a girl that seemed normal and I checked her through the courts, met her current roommates and friends and she checked out. All this clearly was not sufficient. She moved her boyfriend in the very day she moved in. She had never met him before as this was an online relationship. He didn’t have a job and was there 24/7. After a month, I told J that I would not pay half the rent or bills if he was there all the time. She got incredibly angry and threatened to beat me up. Up to this point, we had been sharing cookware (all mine) so I told her she wasn’t allowed to anymore since I was paying half of the bills when I had two roommates. She flipped out and took everything of hers away–the shower curtain, toilet paper, paper towels (that I had paid for initially). Everything. It was unbearable living there because she would often threaten to harm me. The worst part happened one day when I tried putting in my contacts with my solution and it burned. I opened the solution and it was dark brownish-yellow and smelled like urine. She peed in my contact solution bottle. I threw everything away that she might have contaminated and filed a restraining order. I actually ended up suing her on a TV judge show—and won!

At my undergrad, four people lived in a suite. The previous year, my new roommate M had a huge blowout with her old roomie B, so we needed a fourth person C, who we did not really know or want to live with. Turns out that M had lied about everything and now I knew why B had all but moved out of her freshman room – M just needed someone to hate and spread rumors about, and this year it was my turn.

I still do not know what I did to M, despite confronting both her and C about it with my RA’s help. M and C would complain about me in the dorm’s common room. M exuded negative energy and would get pissed if my boyfriend ever stopped by to say hi, even if we left immediately (I spent 80% of my time in his room instead). She formulated a master plan to annoy me and bad-mouthed me to everyone in our sorority to the point that no one would talk to me. I tried to talk civilly with M to resolve the situation before I involved our RA, but she ended up screaming at me and I finally snapped and screamed back.

Let’s not forget C, who would blast her TV and every weeknight for 10 weeks. I politely asked her to turn it down and received a death glare (I had 8am classes, C had noon ones). After keeping me up until 4am, C started blow-drying her hair at 9am, then she wondered why I “burst” into her room after knocking on the shared door twice to ask her to stop. The best was when she lied to my face about something she bragged about to her friends: she “just happened” to be walking by my room past midnight, and she “just happened” to be carrying a bunch of pots and pans, and they “just happened” to clatter to the ground and she “just happened” to not catch them.

I moved out over my Spring break between trimesters with the help of my mom into a one-bedroom apartment and I will NEVER live with anyone again.